ORCID Profile
0000-0002-9359-8958
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Research Topics
In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Top 5 Research Topics
ANZSRC Field of Research (FoR)
Human Geography | Urban and Regional Studies (excl. Planning) | Housing Markets, Development, Management | Economic Geography | Social Change | Sociology | Social Theory |
ANZSRC Socio-Economic Objective (SEO)
Public Services Policy Advice and Analysis | Management and Leadership of Schools/Institutions | Urban Planning | Social Class and Inequalities | Distribution of Income and Wealth | Expanding Knowledge in Technology
Related Links
Publications
Tracing resident antagonisms in urban development: agonistic pluralism and participatory planning
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-04-2018
Thinking relationally about housing and home
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2020
Televised Territorial Stigma: How Social Housing Tenants Experience the Fictional Media Representation of Estates in Australia
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2014
DOI: 10.1068/A46136
Abstract: This paper explores the issue of territorial stigmatisation through tenant-driven research chronicling the experiences of social housing tenants as they examined and reflected upon the Australian television series Housos. The television series aired on an independent, part publicly funded, television station in 2011 and depicts the lifestyles of fictional tenant characters on an imaginary social housing estate. The series presents satirical and exaggerated parodies about everyday life on the estate, drawing on a range of stereotypes of social housing tenants. Tenants are portrayed as feckless and antisocial in iduals who engage in a range of irresponsible and sometimes criminal behaviour in order to avoid work and whose family and other relationships are dysfunctional. Public tenants are far from passive victims of stigmatisation and conducted the analysis presented in this study. They reveal a sophisticated understanding of how stigma operates through the media, various agencies, and the nonresident community. While economic and political forces, and changing modes for governing poverty, have resulted in geographical confinement of residents on estates, tenants reflected on their own ‘real-life’ experiences and provide accounts of deliberate and self-conscious use of ‘negative’ social status to produce positive collective identities. Alternatively, nontenant participants repeated common prejudices about public housing, and reflected on their belief that the system was not effectively preventing welfare cheats and ‘bludgers’ from loafing at their (taxpayers') expense.
Public perceptions of foreign and Chinese real estate investment: intercultural relations in Global Sydney
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-05-2017
Planning the post‐political city: exploring public participation in the contemporary Australian city
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 27-04-2018
Participatory, technocratic and neoliberal planning: an untenable planning governanceménage à trois
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2016
Housing policy and the COVID-19 pandemic: the importance of housing research during this health emergency
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-04-2020
Value pluralism in urban planning
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 25-01-2020
Co-Present Biography: Understanding and Managing Stakeholder Differences to Improve Social Policy Outcomes
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Ltd.
Date: 2014
Chinese property developers after the decline in foreign real estate investment in Sydney, Australia
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-06-2021
Gentrification and displacement: the forced relocation of public housing tenants in inner-Sydney
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-02-2019
The globalisation of real estate: the politics and practice of foreign real estate investment
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2017
Podcasts and Urban Studies: Notes from the Field; Sounds from the Studio
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 19-09-2019
Monitory Democracy as Citizen-driven Participatory Planning: The Urban Politics of Redwatch in Sydney
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 22-02-2016
The Poetics of Cartography and Habitation: Home as a Repository of Memories
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2013
Nautico-imperialism and settler-colonialism: water and land in the New South Wales colony
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2022
Book review: Shaking Up the City: Ignorance, Inequality, and the Urban Question
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-12-2021
Place, political culture and post-Green Ban resistance: Public housing in Millers Point, Sydney
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2016
Education, real estate, immigration: brokerage assemblages and Asian mobilities
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-07-2017
Housing’s values: Housing as an ethical urbanism
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 14-06-2023
DOI: 10.1177/26349825231178799
Abstract: Housing’s values are a key topic of public and policy debate, with discussions including the social value of housing in the form of human rights or care, rising property values, value-capture in infrastructure development, Indigenous values of land, and the value of housing for social reproduction. With this in mind, we engage with the various ways housing is valued, not as a reductive exercise to find ‘the value’ of housing but to recognise and engage with the ways various valuations of housing inform a situated and relational politics of value. The analysis is concerned with how people make valuations about housing as well as how these different housing valuations intersect to constitute a politics of housing values. It is a common reduction to associate housing with its economic value and home with social values. Attempts to reconcile these values typically involve proxy valuations to commensurate the social to the economic. However, value pluralists resist such easy reduction of social values to the market, holding that plural values are incommensurable. Our more-than-political economy approach draws on anthropology and moral philosophical theories of value to conceptualise an agonistic politics of housing value. To illustrate this conceptual case, we discuss three regimes of value in Australia, that is, capitalist regimes of real estate value as the dominant value regime, Indigenous cultural values tied to land and housing and care ethics and human rights as housing discourse. These cases highlight the processes of value realisation, not just within these regimes of value, but within and between them, to animate an agonistic tournament of housing’s value. We are interested in the politics within and between these different claims about value and argue the utility of value theory is to show how value is produced through the politics of competing value claims, rather than to try to show what the value of housing as-an-object is.
Towards a Critical Housing Studies Research Agenda on Platform Real Estate
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 13-10-2019
The university and the city: Spaces of risk, decolonisation, and civic disruption
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 02-11-2021
DOI: 10.1177/0308518X211053019
Abstract: This paper responds to a recent EPA Exchanges paper by Eric Knight, Andrew Jones and Meric Gertler ( Knight et al., 2021 ). It concurs with their argument for the significance of economic geography for explaining the “local-global” dilemmas facing the university in contemporary society. In response, it will propose three additional optics for understanding the role of the university in the contemporary city. First, as a space of risk, where the neo-liberal university is now undertaking various modes of financing their real estate models, drawing on bond markets to finance future growth, soliciting politically risky philanthropic donations, and betting on future student recruitment trends – including the high-risk international student sector – as being sufficient to fund capital investments in buildings and facilities. Second, as a space of decolonisation, where the university must seek to locate c us development within discussions about the university's responsibilities within systems of settler colonialism, and racially inflected gentrification. Third, as a civic disruptor, where the university c us is seen as more than just a backdrop or context to the university's governance, culture, and business models, but also as a front door to understanding the city and economy within which it is embedded.
Creating a thinking space for the rising stars of Australian urban geography
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-04-2019
Australia’s Metropolitan Imperative: An Agenda for Governance Reform
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-12-2019
The Politics of Foreign Investment in Australian Housing: Chinese Investors, Translocal Sales Agents and Local Resistance
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 04-2015
The marketisation of social housing in New South Wales
Publisher: ANU Press
Date: 15-09-2022
Book review forum podcast: The Surrounds
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 06-05-2023
Assemblage theory and the ontological limitations of speculative realism
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 07-2018
Holiday reading list for a post-COVID-19 housing system
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-2020
Property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 26-04-2019
Deal-making, elite networks and public–private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-02-2023
DOI: 10.1177/00420980211067906
Abstract: In this commentary, we argue that augmented concepts and research methods are needed to comprehend hybrid urban governance reconfigurations that benefit market actors but eschew competition in favour of deal-making between elite state and private actors. Fuelled by financialisation and in response to planning conflict are regulatory reforms that legitimise opaque alliances in service of infrastructure and urban development projects. From a specific city (Sydney, Australia) we draw upon one such reform – Unsolicited Proposals – to point to a broader landscape of hybrid urban governance, its reconfigurations of power and potential effect on cities. Whereas neoliberal governance promotes competition and views the state and private sectors as distinct, hybrid urban governance leverages state monopoly power and abjures market competition, instead endorsing high-level public–private coordination, technical and financial expertise and confidential deal-making over major urban projects. We scrutinise how Unsolicited Proposals normalise this approach. Commercial-in-confidence protection and absent tender processes authorise a narrow constellation of influential private and public actors to preconfigure outcomes without oversight. Such reforms, we argue, consolidate elite socio-spatial power, jeopardise city function and lify corruption vulnerabilities. To theorise hybrid urban governance at the intersection of neoliberalism and Asia-Pacific state-capitalism, we offer the concepts of coercive monopoly (where market entry is closed, without opportunity to compete) and de jure collusion (where regulation reforms codify informal alliances among elites connected across government and corporate and consultancy worlds). We call for urban scholarship to pay closer attention to public–private hybridisation in governance, scrutinising regulatory mechanisms that consecrate deal-making and undermine the public interest.
Mapping the frontiers of private property in New South Wales, Australia
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 17-01-2023
Abstract: This article addresses the process and patterns by which private property has been applied on the Australian continent. Alongside both lease‐holdings that are limited by term or perpetual and squatting practices, identifying and documenting private property in both in idual cases and in aggregate over a large geography offers a compelling approximation of the appearance and spread of British–Australian settlement. Plots and patterns of private land ownership can be read in relation to other forms of land use and tenure each subject to specific historical legal instruments and definitions. We explore how, in particular, the first‐generation alienation of private property might be constructed, represented, and theorised using a critical approach to GIS tools and practices. What technical considerations are required to identify the extent of a site and map its transfer into private hands? How far can the process of mapping the initial alienation of parcels of Crown land over time expose legacies of colonial practices in present‐day methods and serve as a testbed to generate other layers that capture, for instance, patterns of informal privatisation or interact with other phenomena—most notably that of frontier violence—that likewise occur on land, in time? Such work can be located among those wrestling with problems of mapping colonial land occupation with technologies that share a heritage with the surveying tools that allowed that same acquisition and can enhance a critical approach to GIS in relation to appropriation and dispossession of Aboriginal land.
Foreign Real Estate Investment and International Education as a Family Wealth Strategy
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 17-10-2022
Inhabitance, place-making and the right to the city: public housing redevelopment in Sydney
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2014
Beyond the post‐political: is public participation in Australian cities at a turning point?
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 14-09-2018
Research, Practice, and the Space Between
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 27-03-2012
Abstract: This article challenges the neoliberal discourse of “instrumental rationality” that is encroaching on theories of qualitative research, critical reflection, and subjectivity. I return to Foucault’s historical ontology of the self and the ancient Athenian precept care of the self to show that critical reflection and rationality have never been mutually exclusive. I put the care of the self metaphor to empirical use by examining the practical and ethical issues that emerged when I transitioned from a state-sponsored frontline employee working with public housing tenants, to a university researcher investigating public housing tenant participation in a state-sponsored urban redevelopment project. The focus is on my experiences as a practitioner-researcher working within two neoliberalized institutions, while also constructing a performative research ethic to mount a challenge against the politics of neoliberal “evidence” in the space between.
Cities for profit: the real estate turn in Asia’s urban politics
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 27-10-2021
Cities in COVID-19: Reconsidering Urban Form, Mobility, Housing and Planning in Australasia
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2023
Intersectionalizing Housing Discrimination Under Rentier Capitalism in an Asset-Based Society
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-01-2023
The city under COVID-19
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 09-06-2020
DOI: 10.1111/TESG.12426
Abstract: This critical commentary reflects on a rapidly mobilised international podcast project, in which 25 urban scholars from around the world provided audio recordings about their cities during COVID‐19. New digital tools are increasing the speeds, formats and breadth of the research and communication mediums available to researchers. Voice recorders on mobile phones and digital audio editing on laptops allows researchers to collaborate in new ways, and this podcast project pushed at the boundaries of what a research method and community might be. Many of those who provided short audio 'reports from the field' recorded on their mobile phones were struggling to make sense of their experience in their city during COVID‐19. The substantive sections of this commentary discuss the digital methodology opportunities that podcasting affords geographical scholarship. In this case the methodology includes the curated production of the podcast and critical reflection on the podcast process through collaborative writing. Then putting this methodology into action some limited reflections on cities under COVID‐19 lockdown and social distancing initiatives around the world are provided to demonstrate the utility and limitations of this method.
Podcasting and Urban Planning
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 15-03-2019
Unsolicited urbanism: development monopolies, regulatory-technical fixes and planning-as-deal-making
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 24-08-2021
Abstract: This article identifies the evolution of, and critiques, unsolicited urbanism—a project of city-shaping favouring powerful market actors but inconsistent with the neoliberal tenet of competition. Marked by predetermined outcomes, unsolicited urbanism legitimates secretive monopolies over specific sites and the normalization of planning-as-deal-making. Such features are not uncommon globally, as circuits of capital seek rent opportunities latent in urban land, and as market actors increasingly exercise power over development decision-making. But following casino-led mega-development in Melbourne (Southbank/Docklands) and Sydney (Barangaroo), Australia, unsolicited urbanism has coalesced as a clearly-identifiable project, inflected by relationships forged in the Asia-Pacific. The project, promoted by coalitions of developers, global capital, state government, and real estate, engineering and financing consultants, targets not just new sites for development, but the planning system itself. At its heart is a novel urban planning instrument, Unsolicited Proposals, that codifies and legitimizes bold and secretive bids for sites and assets over which governments and communities have not signalled intent or need for change. Unsolicited Proposal guidelines solicit premeditated, commercial-in-confidence bids to redevelop key urban assets without outside competition. Originating in two high-profile waterfront sites in Australia, the formalized Unsolicited Proposal planning process has spread elsewhere as a ‘fix’ to ‘unlock’ urban spaces for casino development, infrastructure financing and quasi-privatizations, with foreboding signs of its rapid mobility. The project of unsolicited urbanism connects money and power in new ways to reshape cities, and this analysis shows how a suite of regulatory-technical processes has been reconfigured to make this possible.
The politics of value in urban development: Valuing conflict in agonistic pluralism
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 03-2019
Abstract: In this article, we consider the role of value pluralism in theorising urban development and the politics of participatory planning. Rather than situating analyses of urban development in a monist or universalist ethics, where values are reducible to a single universal (e.g. human rights), or a normative pluralism based on the tension between different bearers of political value (e.g. liberty and equality), we argue for a plural ethics to make sense of the complex empirical reality of our cities. Post-consensus theories of planning treat the presence of conflict as an enduring reality in urban development, with Chantal Mouffe providing one way of conceptualising a productive politics of conflict. We extend Mouffe’s plural politics through an appeal to value pluralism in the form of anthropological theories of value. A better understanding of the plural and incommensurable nature of values not only contributes to our understanding of the operation of agonistic pluralism, it also provides a more robust theoretical account of how different urban actors in the city transition from antagonism to agonism, which Mouffe suggests is necessary for a more inclusive urban politics. The politics of value resides in the struggle for legitimacy of particular regimes of value not just to determine economic value, but to define what value is, and how different values dominate, encompass or otherwise relate to one another. This moral politics approach, via value theory, provides one way of tracing an ethical urbanism that exists between conflict and consensus. It allows us to reframe the central challenge of agonistic pluralism as the transition from antagonistic positions, marked by moral intransigence and immutability, towards more flexible value positions that allow ‘adversaries’ to enter into a viable agonistic politics.
The Sydney Metropolitan Strategy as a Zoning Technology: Analyzing the Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Obsolescence
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 2014
DOI: 10.1068/D20912
Abstract: This paper provides two discrete contributions to urban and spatial theory. The first demonstrates that within discourse analysis conceptions of time and space have analytical utility for investigations into the framings of social and urban policy. The second moves analyses of urban obsolescence beyond Marxism to demonstrate that Foucauldian theory can provide revealing insights about the stewardship of discourses of urban obsolescence through texts and visual images created by different social actors. On the basis of these two contributions I demonstrate how the Sydney metropolitan planning authority has deployed specific spatial and temporal ‘zoning technologies’ to demarcate and evaluate sections of the city. The discourses of obsolescence that have emerged in Sydney are clearly informed by market-centric ideology and discursively constructed, not in the presence of an anemic state and a rational market, but as a technology of power that is deployed by the state and serves the interests of powerful market actors. I conclude that this discursive process is leading to the demise of Sydney's public housing estates.
Australian urban geographies of housing in the context of the rise of China in the “Asian Century ”
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 26-10-2018
Emplaced Displacement and Public Housing Redevelopment: From Physical Displacement to Social, Cultural, and Economic Replacement
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-07-2021
Translating housing research to policy impact: rethinking policy and creating new publics through podcasts and documentary filmmaking
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 03-07-2022
Housing and Socio-Spatial Inclusion
Publisher: Cogitatio
Date: 09-04-2015
DOI: 10.17645/SI.V3I2.264
Abstract: This special issue on housing and socio-spatial inclusion had its genesis in the 5th Housing Theory Symposium (HTS) on the theme of housing and space, held in Brisbane, Australia in 2013. In late 2013 we put out a call for papers in an attempt to collect an initial suite of theoretical and empirical scholarship on this theme. This collection of articles progresses our initial discussions about the theoretical implications of adding the “social” to the conceptual project of thinking through housing and space. We hope that this special issue will act as a springboard for a critical review of housing theory, which could locate housing at the centre of a much broader network of social and cultural practices across different temporal trajectories and spatial scales. This editorial presents an overview of the theoretical discussions at the HTS and summarises the six articles in this themed issue, which are: (1) The meaning of home in home birth experiences (2) Reconceptualizing the “publicness” of public housing (3) The provision of visitable housing in Australia (4) The self-production of dwellings made by the Brazilian new middle class (5) Innovative housing models and the struggle against social exclusion in cities and (6) A theoretical and an empirical analysis of “poverty suburbanization”.
Global city aspirations, graduated citizenship and public housing: analysing the consumer citizenships of neoliberalism
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2014
Finding hope in unpromising times: Stories of progressive planning alternatives for a world in crisis/Neoliberal planning is not the only way: mapping the regressive tendencies of planning practice/Ca
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 12-2013
Cultural platform capitalism: extracting value from cultural asymmetries in RealTech
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-04-2019
Spooky concepts and urban studies: Conceptual metaphor, narrative tension and explanatory power
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-06-2023
DOI: 10.1177/27541258231179202
Abstract: From the metaphor-soaked concepts of Dracula urbanism, the V ire index, Frankenstein urbanism and zombie neoliberalism to the idea of a v ire property-holding class, conceptual metaphors are a repeating theme in urban studies. Once you are alert to their presence, conceptual metaphors seem to be everywhere, operating as key literary devices, productive interpretive tactics and critical discursive manoeuvres in the field. And if it is true that metaphor is an important conceptual device in urban studies, then the field's use of conceptual metaphor deserves our critical attention. Taking Wilson and Wyly's Dracula urbanism as a prompt, this commentary offers some speculative reflections on conceptual metaphor in urban studies, before commenting on Dracula urbanism as a concept directly. The discussion is organised around the narrative tension, explanatory power and discursive playfulness that conceptual metaphor affords in urban studies. I argue the power of conceptual metaphor comes into play at the level of analytical acuity. A good conceptual metaphor has an explanatory power that moves our understanding of an urban process, issue, etc. forward. It opens new conceptual vistas, or it brings into focus new conceptual stakes, or it paths the way for new types of empirical investigation in the field. Put simply, a good conceptual metaphor allows for a good theoretical intervention. It has productive explanatory power it takes urban scholars somewhere beyond their initial excitement about a fancy new name for a concept. A spooky conceptual metaphor must be analytically powerful, otherwise it's just Halloween an empty signifier dressed up as Frankenstein for a night, trick or treating for citations and attention.
Planning, Land and Housing in the Digital Data Revolution/The Politics of Digital Transformations of Housing/Digital Innovations, PropTech and Housing – the View from Melbourne/Digital Housing and Ren
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 08-08-2019
Geographies of hyper-commodified housing: foreign capital, market activity, and housing stress
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 17-04-2018
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Related Funding Activities
Linkage Projects - Grant ID: LP190100619
Start Date: 04-2021
End Date: 10-2024
Amount: $230,703.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivitySpecial Research Initiatives - Grant ID: SR200200443
Start Date: 10-2020
End Date: 12-2024
Amount: $241,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityDiscovery Projects - Grant ID: DP220102094
Start Date: 03-2022
End Date: 02-2025
Amount: $335,104.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity